The Cold Winter Wind
by Kat Lee formerly Pirate Turner
Summary: A lone figure stood in the graveyard as howling winds whipped her yellow trench coat all around her, but though the Winter wind was icy, it could never compete with the coldness in her heart. Death fic.


Title: "The Cold Winter Wind"  
Author: Pirate Turner  
Rating: PG-13 for mature themes  
Summary: A lone figure stood in the graveyard as howling winds whipped her yellow trench coat all around her, but though the Winter wind was icy, it could never compete with the coldness in her heart.  
Warnings: Het, Suicide, Death fic  
Challenge: Peja's 24-hour challenge to use "When your baby doesn't love you any more" on 19/11/08  
Disclaimer: Jubilation "Jubilee" Lee, Angelo "Angie" "Skin" Espinosa, Sean "Banshee" Cassidy, Emma "White Queen" Frost, Scott "Cyclops" Summers, Generation X, and the X-Men are © & TM Marvel comics, not the author, and are used without permission. Everything else is © & TM the author. The author makes absolutely no profit off of this work of fan fiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.

A lone figure stood in the graveyard as howling winds whipped her yellow trench coat all around her. She came here only once a year now and walked the line to remind her of what once was but would never be again. She started with the only two graves that were joined in eternal peace. She read the names and endearments that she had seen to being ordered and ran her cold, bare hands gingerly over the concrete.

He had been one of the greatest men she had ever had the honor of knowing and one of her several beloved fathers, but even he had turned his back on her. He had left them all, abandoned them after Moira's death when the grief had set in, but she knew it was more than that. She knew that the guilt had rode far deeper and more painfully than the grief, and that it was the guilt that had finally made him make that one simple mistake. He had welcomed death, and he had found it, dying as the hero he had always been.

She stopped by the next one, her fingers lingering on the last name of the grave's inhabitant. No matter what she had said, almost every one had known that the woman she pretended to be was a far cry from the woman she really was. It had been his death that had driven her over the deep end, and when she had died, Jubilee had known just where Emma had to be buried and had seen to it.

Though mystery shrouded her death, Jubilee also knew the truth of what had happened. Without Sean, Emma had gone slowly insane until she had ended up releasing her own self from the misery that had engulfed her heart. Jubilee would never tell any one the truth and would do whatever she had to to hide it for Emma was a hero and she wanted nothing to mar the image of the woman she had grown to become, the woman who had taught her so much, like how to be cold to a world that no longer cared about you.

Emma had been coldest near her death, having not a kind word to say about any one, making rash decisions, and helping Scott rule what was left of the X-Men, the team Jubilee had once cherished beyond all else, with an iron-clad fist. But Jubilee had known. She had known because she had always realized the love that Sean and Emma had shared, though they had never said or done anything about it. She had known because they wore the same expression when looking at each other as she and her own beloved had, and she had known what had killed them because she, too, had felt that pain.

She ignored the howling wind, allowing it to affect her only to the point that she wrapped her coat tighter around her. {But that's what happens when your baby doesn't love you any more,} she thought sadly, {or when Death takes them too swiftly.} She stomped her boot angrily into the dirt and turned to face the last grave.

"I never should've made that promise to ya, ya know." Her words sounded as choked as her heart felt. He had known, she thought not for the first or even the hundredth time. Her dear, sweet Angie had somehow known his time was coming to an end, and that was why he had made her promise him that no matter happened, she would continue, she would survive.

Her unpainted lips pulled back into a silent snarl of mingled sarcasm, anger, remorse, and irony. Some survival her life had become. No family, no friends, not even any ties to the X-Men any more, nothing worth living for, and yet she survived. She lived a life she didn't care for, worked with people who could die at any second and whose deaths she would pass over with relative carelessness, and knew no fun, had known no fun since he had left her. At one time, the mere thought of her life now would have made her break down into tears, but now?

Now she had no more tears left to cry, and she couldn't remember when the last one had dropped from her blue eyes. She turned away from him, from his grave, and from his memory, but in her mind, heart, and soul, she knew she would never be able to walk away from him nor from what he had done to her. She had made a promise, and because she loved him, she would keep that promise . . . even if he must have stopped loving her long ago for a life like the one she held now was no life. It was merely survival, survival on an Earth and in a life that had become as sure a Hell to her as if Hell's own eternal flames were gnawing relentlessly away at her bones.

She walked away for one more year, longing for the day that she could fill the empty grave already dug next to Angelo's with her own body. She walked away, thinking of what once was and what would be forever more. She walked away, her thought whispering back through her mind, {That's what happens when your baby doesn't love you any more.} He had condemned her, knowingly or unknowingly, to Hell, and she would survive it for as long as she could because she loved him and would keep her promise to him.

Jubilee walked away from the only place on Earth she still wanted to be, never seeing the ghost watching her forlornly nor the wispy, gray hand reaching for her and never hearing the three little words that might have made all the difference whispered on the cold Winter wind.

**The End**


End file.
